ABSTRACT Although high school science course‐taking is highly valued in college admissions, its predictability for college enrollment, a key step in access to many STEM fields, has not been sufficiently investigated in the context of wide variability in science courses and updated standards. Furthermore, while ability group tracking in science has declined, tracking can persist in the levels, type, and breadth of science courses taken. The study analyzes students' science course‐taking pathways from ninth through eleventh grade and examines their relationship with college enrollment. We use cross‐classified hierarchical logistic regression modeling of students nested within both course pathways and schools in a large urban school district, examining school and course pathway features and controlling for academic performance and student characteristics. An analysis of variance partitioning shows that science course pathways explain more of the variance in on‐time college enrollment than schools. Completing the three core science courses—biology, chemistry, and physics—remains a strong predictor of college enrollment, even in the context of updated science standards, but the presence of advanced science coursework in the pathway showed the strongest association with college enrollment. Greater school STEM‐orientation was associated with increased likelihood of college enrollment.
ABSTRACT Understanding how students identify with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) is crucial for fostering broader and more equitable participation within these fields. While existing research has focused on students who either strongly identify with STEM or disengage from it, this study explores the moderate STEM identities of students who occupy a “gray zone” between these extremes. These students, aged 12–16, exhibit moderate STEM identities configured through varying degrees of interest, competence, self‐efficacy, and aspirations across STEM and non‐STEM domains, and further modulated by patterns of perceived recognition. Using data from a sample of 1004 students across 64 schools in Catalonia, Spain, we conducted a hierarchical cluster analysis to explore patterns in self‐identification and related constructs. The analyses revealed three clusters of students with moderate STEM identities. Cluster 3, predominantly male, displayed strong interest and recognition in mathematics and physical education but leaned toward non‐STEM aspirations. Clusters 4 and 5, mainly female, showed high academic performance in STEM subjects but reported lower self‐efficacy, recognition, and STEM‐related aspirations. In particular, Cluster 4 displayed a strong alignment with the arts, while Cluster 5 preferred languages and social sciences. These patterns suggest that while these students have the potential to pursue STEM pathways, their broader interests and perceived lack of recognition in STEM hinder their identity development. The study highlights the critical role of recognition in shaping STEM identities, particularly for girls, whose achievements in STEM are often overshadowed by their strengths in other domains. Additionally, mathematics plays a pivotal role in boys' moderate STEM identities, albeit often viewed instrumentally rather than as a career pathway. We discuss implications for educational practice, including the potential of STEAM approaches that integrate arts and creativity, along with more tailored forms of recognition in STEM teaching.
ABSTRACT Despite the growing interest in incorporating care ethics into STEM education, these topics are rarely integrated into K‐12 standards and pedagogical practice. We explore how care praxis, a political and ethical approach to STEM education, supports students' sense‐making in addressing real‐world problems throughout STEM design, merging social, environmental, and technical aspects. Care praxis highlights the iterative, reflective method of initiating action, acting as an ethical, political, humanistic, and justice‐oriented mode of engagement with the world, thereby fostering sustainable communities. Drawing upon participatory critical design‐based research and ethnographic methods, we collaborated with two teachers, students, and families from an urban middle school classroom to adapt and implement a STEM curriculum that focuses on engineering for sustainable communities. Our findings show how a care praxis in the context of a STEM unit focused on engineering for sustainable communities can support students in more expansive sense‐making by enacting care‐oriented, community‐engaged engineering practices. The process was facilitated through four stages of caring within the design cycle: (1) caring‐about social needs (identifying a problem), (2) taking‐care by solidifying and prioritizing these needs (refining a problem in collaboration with community and determining criteria for solving a problem), (3) care‐giving by designing solutions that connect social, environmental, and technical aspects (designing and iterating solutions), and (4) nested‐care by expanding the design functionality to foster well‐being and active participation in community building (integrating designs into everyday practice). We discuss how to enact the transformative potential of integrating a care praxis into middle school STEM education, thereby fostering a more contextual and ethical approach to design solutions. A care praxis approach bridges epistemologies and ontologies, creating a productive space for students to engage in sense‐making around humanization and justice‐oriented aspects of science and engineering.
ABSTRACT Science teachers' ability to accurately judge students' knowledge and skills is essential for successful teaching and, thus, highly relevant to science teacher education. Findings from studies focusing on language and mathematics have shown that (pre‐service) teachers' judgment accuracy is not only subject‐specific but may also vary across particular competencies within a subject. Science is a highly multifaceted domain. Therefore, the question arises as to whether (pre‐service) science teachers' judgment accuracy is specific to particular science competencies. In the present study, we investigated the judgment accuracy of pre‐service science teachers across two science competencies of the PISA 2025 Science Framework: “Explain phenomena scientifically” and “Research, evaluate and use scientific information for decision making and action.” We assessed participants' judgment accuracy in these two competencies using two distinct modules of the digital classroom environment Simulated Classroom Biology (SCR Bio ). Further, we examined factors influencing their judgment accuracy using blockwise hierarchical regression analyses. For each science competency, 53 participants conducted a simulated lesson in the SCR Bio and judged a total of 2831 virtual student answers. Participants' judgment accuracy was not significantly correlated across the two competencies examined, providing an initial indication that pre‐service science teachers' judgment accuracy might be specific to particular science competencies. Based on our results, we suggest that judgment accuracy should be promoted separately for each competency; however, future research should further investigate the specificity of science teachers' judgment accuracy with larger sample sizes. In both SCR Bio modules, participants' content knowledge related to the respective competency was a predictor of their judgment accuracy. Our simulation‐based approach proved to be beneficial for controlling potential biases and examining the judgment accuracy of pre‐service teachers. Moreover, the SCR Bio enabled us to analyze both participants' evaluations of student answers during a simulated lesson and their judgments of virtual students' overall performance.
ABSTRACT In the context of severe and worsening science teacher shortages in many countries and a body of literature reliant on retrospective accounts from those already teaching science, this paper explores the views and assumptions held about school science teaching by potential future science teachers. Using a theoretical lens informed by the concept of ‘figured worlds’, this paper presents analyses of qualitative data collected in the UK and Canada via longitudinal and life history methods to examine what science majors assume to be true about science teaching, and what influences shape these assumptions. Analyses demonstrate that the world of science teaching is distinct, and even isolated, from the world of science according to potential future science teachers. These data evidence contrasting epistemologies between the worlds of science teaching and science, and indicate that those who have worked to conduct their identities in line with science may struggle to develop identities within, or towards, the figured world of science teaching. We end this paper with a discussion of the implications of these findings in relation to ongoing science teacher shortages.
Grounded in queer theory, this study explores the intersections of queerness and STEM trajectories through the lived experiences of three queer adults with postgraduate degrees in STEM and contributes their insights for queering STEM education. We used artifacts, in-depth semi-structured interviews, and a focus group to identify aspects of STEM education that constrained or supported participants' trajectories and to offer strategies for queering STEM educational spaces. We analyzed verbatim transcripts with both inductive and deductive approaches to identify key categories related to challenges and opportunities for queering STEM education. The findings highlight the importance of transforming (a) the culture of STEM, (b) the image of STEM, (c) the curriculum and pedagogies, and (d) the teacher-student relationships, to challenge dominant norms and reconfigure STEM education as a site of disruption and alternative knowledge-making. The study underscores the significance of lived experience as a legitimate source of theory by centering queer voices as knowledge producers, offering a transformative reimagining of STEM education through a queer lens.
Recent reforms in science education emphasize engaging students in authentic sensemaking practices. Central to this vision is positioning students as epistemic agents who generate questions, negotiate ideas, and co-construct scientific understanding. Yet, classroom realities reveal persistent tensions in implementing these ideals, particularly in elementary settings. This multiple case study draws on classroom video and post-lesson debriefs of five elementary teachers identified as instructional innovators in a multi-year professional development project. Using a framework of four opportunities for epistemic agency as an analytic frame, moments of student-driven sensemaking in phenomena-based science activities were analyzed. Findings showed the following tensions in shifting epistemic agency to students: (1) honoring student contributions versus steering discourse toward canonical science, (2) providing scaffolds and roles that clarify participation versus unintentionally constraining sensemaking, (3) supporting student-driven knowledge products that reflect everyday reasoning versus aligning with disciplinary ideas and principles, and (4) creating space to renegotiate classroom norms versus maintaining order. These tensions reveal the dynamic negotiation of epistemic agency in classrooms, and underscore that supporting students' epistemic agency is a continual balancing act shaped by time, curricular mandates, and classroom culture. Implications for teacher professional learning, emphasizing the need to cultivate equitable classroom norms, plan for productive trade-offs, and design systemic supports that expand opportunities for all students to engage as epistemic agents in science learning are discussed.
Science identity is a key predictor of persistence in STEM. Although prior research has established the importance of social recognition for identity development, less is known about how recognition operates within informal, everyday interactions. This explanatory sequential mixed methods study investigated whether and how social recognition during informal science talk contributes to science identity and STEM persistence, particularly for undergraduate women who often encounter gendered barriers within scientific environments. The quantitative strand included a longitudinal survey of 211 undergraduate STEM majors. Results showed that social recognition during conversations about science predicted increases in science identity and indirectly predicted STEM persistence through increases in science identity, but only for women. The qualitative strand consisted of semi-structured interviews with 22 undergraduate women in STEM and elaborated the mechanisms underlying these relationships. Women described recognition as occurring through specific conversational behaviors, including attentive listening, follow-up questions, remembered interests, encouragement, and being treated as knowledgeable by others. These interactions helped women reappraise doubts about their competence, validate their legitimacy as "science people," and strengthen motivation to persist in STEM pathways. Interview data also revealed that recognition was shaped by relational context and social comparison. Recognition from professors often signaled legitimacy within scientific spaces, recognition from family members often communicated encouragement and support for students' interests and aspirations, and recognition from peers often shaped students' visibility and sense of belonging within science-oriented social groups. Women further described how racialized and gendered microaggressions undermined recognition and required them to repeatedly prove their competence, particularly for Black and Latina participants. Together, the findings suggest that informal social recognition functions as a relational mechanism through which women develop science identities and sustain persistence in STEM. Fostering recognition in everyday interactions and educational contexts may therefore represent an important pathway for advancing equity in STEM.
Science education has shifted from a focus on canonical correctness toward students and their sensemaking. In response, teacher educators have explored video analysis as an activity for helping teacher candidates (TCs) notice students and their resources. Framing (e.g., facilitator prompts, protocols) influences what TCs learn through video analysis. Here, we analyze the influence of framing on one feature of an undergraduate elementary science methods course: video clubs that were intended to support TCs in noticing students' resources. Our data come from a larger study that designed, implemented, and evaluated an elementary science methods course at two universities: A large public university in the midwestern US and a small private university in the southeastern US. In this paper, using a case study approach, we compare two structures for framing TCs' noticing of students' resources during video clubs: open-ended prompts and a protocol. Specifically, we analyze data from two contrasting cases: (a) one facilitator-led video club using guiding prompts and an open-ended structure (Year 1) and (b) one TC-led video club that relied on a protocol (adapted from Jilk [2016]) with targeted sentence frames to focus TCs' noticing on students' resources (Year 2). We found that in both cases TCs attended to students' resources. The TCs in the prompt-facilitated discussion focused more often on students' non-canonical strengths (e.g., cultural knowledge) and on teaching, yet use of a facilitator limited TCs' opportunities for participation. In comparison, the TCs in the protocol-guided discussion focused more often on students' canonical assets (e.g., understandings of force and motion) and non-canonical strengths (e.g., interactional resources), and the TCs had more opportunities for participation without a facilitator. These findings offer implications for teacher educators aiming to support equitable science teaching through courses and professional development.
Students' domain-specific mindsets and their beliefs about their capacity to improve through effort play a crucial role in shaping their experiences and decisions to persist in STEM disciplines. Physics is generally seen as a field requiring innate brilliance, which can reinforce fixed mindsets, particularly after initial setbacks in performance that are common in introductory university courses. In this study, we examine changes in fixed mindsets and potential gender differences in an introductory calculus-based physics course. Our sample consisted of 508 students with an average age of 18, predominantly White, with men comprising the majority. Based upon survey response distributions, three distinct mindset categories were identified: Hesitant, Hopeful, and Confident, describing how strongly students rejected a fixed mindset in physics. The results suggested large gender differences in distributions at the high and low-end groups. We also found an overall decline toward fixed mindsets across the course, and logistic regressions controlling for initial mindsets showed that women were significantly more likely than men to shift away from the Confident category. While the majority of men tended to stay within the Confident category, the majority of women moved away from it. Particularly, this differential shift was seen among students receiving Bs or Cs, the most commonly awarded grades in this course. Furthermore, there were relatively small differences in the probability of change within men as a function of grades received, whereas women showed marked declines toward fixed beliefs with either a B or C. Our findings provide empirical evidence for the dynamic, grade-sensitive nature of students' mindsets in a calculus-based physics course. In particular, gendered differences in the probability of retaining confidence in the face of commonly awarded lower grades have implications for improving instructional strategies and highlight the need for targeted interventions that help promote resilience among students at higher risks of adopting a fixed mindset.
Augmented reality (AR) is increasingly integrated into science education, yet the role of teacher support in fostering students' self-efficacy within AR-based inquiry learning remains underexplored. This mixed-methods study investigated the effects of the AR-based inquiry learning activities on students' science self-efficacy in various dimensions, as well as the impact of teacher support and students' attitudes toward the features of the designed AR learning environment on students' science self-efficacy. The study involved 114 Grade 5 students from four classes of a primary school in Singapore. The results showed that the use of AR significantly improved students' conceptual understanding and science communication self-efficacy. Teachers' emotional support played a key role in conceptual understanding and practical work self-efficacy, while instrumental support was particularly influential in everyday application. Both forms of teacher support significantly contributed to science communication self-efficacy. Additionally, students' attitudes toward the AR features partially mediated the effect of emotional support on conceptual understanding self-efficacy. These findings provide insights for both researchers and practitioners into the importance of and design consideration for adaptive teacher support in optimizing AR-based science learning in primary school classrooms.
Mechanistic reasoning is a powerful and vital approach for science students to explain scientific phenomena. Current research on students' mechanistic reasoning aims to enhance unpacking, that is, the identification and description of entities at lower scalar levels. However, even the most comprehensive mechanistic explanation must conceal some mechanistic details due to insufficient knowledge or to maintain coherence. These knowledge gaps, known as "explanatory black boxes," are significant in science education because they highlight areas of incomplete knowledge, facilitating discussions of explanation quality. We explored the impact of familiarizing students with explanatory black boxes by explicitly referring to them during learning. This "black-box pedagogy" was implemented in a 14-h online course focusing on cancer-onset mechanisms. It involved iteratively highlighting black boxes in mechanistic explanations before delving into deeper mechanisms. Our goal was to examine whether and how this pedagogy may scaffold (a) the learning of mechanisms that span multiple scalar levels and (b) students' understanding of epistemic considerations in the context of black boxes and mechanistic explanations. We analyzed learning outcomes of 10th-grade biology students in two phases. In the first, we used pre- and post-questionnaires, along with in-course prompts, to examine shifts in students' construction of mechanistic explanations and students' creation of questions regarding mechanistic details. In the second, students created poster projects and reflective worksheets that offered insights into their decision-making processes regarding which mechanistic details to include or exclude. Findings indicated that black-box pedagogy effectively supports students' focus on explicated black boxes and their unpacking, as well as their ability to identify implicit black boxes. In addition, this pedagogy facilitates discussions of epistemic issues related to the unpacking and black-boxing of mechanistic details. While challenges and limitations exist, particularly in addressing lower-level molecular mechanisms, this study underscores the importance of explicitly discussing, rather than avoiding, black boxes in the science classroom.
As the nation and world face pressing contemporary science challenges at the intersection of race, place, and socioeconomic status (e.g., the climate crisis), it is imperative to nurture the strengths of racially and linguistically diverse student populations as thought partners and problem solvers in K-12 classrooms. Too often, the labels English Learner (EL) or Academic Language Learner (ALL) position students through deficit orientations, focusing on what they supposedly lack rather than what they bring to science learning environments. To foster more inclusive science teaching aligned to frameworks of educational dignity, we conducted educator self-study within secondary and elementary science teaching methods courses at a comprehensive public university to examine how concepts of critical language awareness, translanguaging, and raciolinguistics were integrated into teacher preparation curriculum and how candidates engaged with these themes.
In this response to Tolbert's 2025 commentary, "Trust, Distrust, and the 'Competent Outsider': Rethinking Science Education's Responsibilities in the (Dis)Information Crisis," we address the nature of disinformation in the untamed landscape of public media, what we call "science-in-the-wild." We contrast political perspectives about how to situate science in society with the epistemic need to share specialized knowledge in society and the corresponding educational role of science media literacy in discerning who speaks for the expert scientific consensus. Notably, we distinguish interpersonal trust (based on individual judgments about power and benevolence) with epistemic trust (based on principles of conveying reliable knowledge).
Recent educational reforms emphasize that science learning should offer students a practice-oriented, authentic experience that reflects how scientists investigate the natural world. Game-based learning has been recognized as a way to transform inquiry practices by making it engaging, interactive, and relevant to students' lives, though its value ultimately depends on the extent to which learning transfers beyond gameplay. In line with this, we designed an integrated virtual-physical scientific practice approach, realized through instructional modules anchored in a mobile learning game (Anter) and extended into classroom and field investigations. This approach situates students in the practices of scientists within a virtual environment while deliberately connecting those practices to real-world contexts. A quasi-experimental, two-group pretest-posttest research design was conducted among 58 eleventh-grade students (aged 16-17) from two classes, with one assigned to the experimental group (N = 30) and the other to the control group (N = 28). Results showed that the integrated approach benefited students' understanding of ants and their skills related to investigating ants more than modules without the game. Moreover, it alleviated disparities across initial proficiency levels by allowing all students to actively engage in various aspects of scientific practices and develop their science identity. Notably, students with lower initial proficiency reported greater gains in science identity than their counterparts in the control group. These findings underscore the effectiveness of the integrated virtual-physical scientific practice approach, particularly for those who may feel disengaged or alienated from science education. Further implications are discussed.
This agential realist narrative inquiry maps the entangled process of becoming-STEMM educator-with as it materialized through the implementation of a kindergarten unit on germs in a historically marginalized urban school. Intra-acting with Barad's theories of agential realism and spectral materialism, the study resists humanist framings of identity as internal or developmental, instead attending to the material and discursive forces (e.g., curriculum materials, institutional mandates, student bodies, affective atmospheres, and hauntings of pandemic-era schooling) that co-constituted pedagogical becoming. Rather than locating agency within the teacher, Ms. West, the analysis follows how her enactments emerged through shifting relations with students, tools, classroom routines, and inherited exclusions. Her initial hesitation toward the curriculum is read not as resistance, but as a hauntological re-turn, an affective-material residue of past mandates and constrained reforms. Through diffractive analysis of interview data, implementation logs, and student artifacts, the study maps how pedagogical shifts unfolded through emergent relationalities, where care, inquiry, and ethical responsiveness were not applied but materialized within the apparatus itself. Becoming-STEMM educator-with, in this account, is not an individual transformation but an ontological reconfiguration shaped by spectral histories, institutional logics, and material-discursive intra-actions. This work contributes to science education by troubling teacher identity as a fixed or intentional process and foregrounding the haunted material conditions through which STEMM pedagogies come to matter. It calls for professional learning spaces attuned to the affective, ethical, and infrastructural forces that shape possibilities for teaching, learning, and becoming otherwise.
Due to the far-reaching and life-threatening consequences of climate change, science education is becoming increasingly important for preparing students to become climate literate citizens. Climate literacy, which encompasses knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to climate change, can provide a strong foundation for informed climate action. While the influence of students' climate change-related knowledge on their engagement in climate action has been the focus of much research and debate, few studies in the field of science education have examined how the combination of cognitive and psycho-social aspects of climate literacy relates to students' climate engagement. The present study addresses this gap by exploring the relative contribution of different aspects of climate literacy (i.e., knowledge, skills, risk perception, and value orientations) to students' willingness to engage in climate action. Using the method of sequential regression analysis, we analyzed data collected from 1309 German and Swedish students. The patterns of the results in both countries are similar: Students' risk perception is found to be the relatively strongest predictor of their willingness to engage in climate action. Value orientations were also identified as strong predictors, while cognitive factors seem to have less explanatory power. Conclusively, our study suggests that science education should consider psycho-social factors alongside teaching of the necessary knowledge, especially if we aim to empower students to go beyond the theoretical discussion of how to combat climate change.
Queer undergraduates describe a climate in STEM fields and classrooms that is both hostile to and silent on queer identities, leading to experiences of social exclusion, devaluation as a scientist, and discrimination. In the few studies that have specifically focused on trans and non-binary undergraduates (i.e., students with queer genders), these students report more hostile conditions than their cisgender peers. In biology and biology-related majors, where core courses include topics related to sex, gender, reproduction, sexual behavior, and sexual and romantic orientation, the content itself may influence a student's experience. Yet, biology is the study of the diversity of life, including diversity across sex, gender, reproduction, sexual behavior, and orientation, which also makes course content a prime site for narratives that support students with queer identities. We employed Master Narrative theory to understand the narratives about sex, gender, reproduction, sexual behavior, and orientation present in undergraduate biology courses through interviews with biology majors with queer genders. We identified three narratives that both supported the belonging of students with queer genders and had the ability to challenge harmful societal narratives. These three narratives could manifest in the classroom in multiple ways, ranging from short disclaimers to elaborate case studies involving human examples. The ways the narratives manifested impacted their efficacy for at least some participants. These narratives and how they manifest provide potential starting points for designing interventions to support students with queer genders in biology classrooms and more accurately teach the biology of sex, gender, reproduction, sexual behavior, and orientation.
